March 21, 2014

Featuring an undercurrent of death, the looming menace of fascism and wrapped in a century’s worth of nostalgia, Wes Anderson’sThe Grand Budapest Hotel stands as yet another brilliant masterstroke of colorful cinema hiding a profound affection for humanity by the American director. Despite what you might think, Anderson has not forgotten his sense of humor. Although, at some points in the film, you may feel confused about whether to laugh or cringe at the events that befall these poor characters at a break-neck, deadpan pace.

The key to the film lies in memory. It plays a central role in how the action unfolds. The Grand Budapest Hotel opens in the modern world with a young, “edgy” girl paying tribute to a monument devoted to an unnamed “author.” Then the film travels to the memory of that author alive in 1985 and his reflecting on his younger years in 1968 and a story he was once told about a 1933-era concierge. Anderson wryly uses various aspect ratios to denote the different times, or better put: layers of memory. The music of Alexandre Desplat has an appropriately ghostly quality throughout the film. On many occasions bells and chimes echo, drums hiss with brushes and vibrant zithers tremolo. And, no, there are no catchy ’60s Brit-pop songs thrown into the mix. Once again, Anderson has created a different kind of film, albeit one from his very particular world (See also: ‘Moonrise Kingdom’: a different kind of Wes Anderson film).

Then, of course, there is the mise-en-scène‎ and colors, a sort of hyper-reality featuring pinks, purples and reds. The titular hotel, situated in the made-up country of Zubrowka, during the key era of the 4:3 aspect ratio (the 1930s), gleams with opulence. Anderson’s restlessly panning camera lens has never felt more alive than in this beautifully designed environment that looks like a life-size doll house, and Robert D. Yeoman’s cinematography slurps it all to luscious effect.

Finally, the characters: Our hero, M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes acting as if he were a born Anderson player), displays an amazing, if sometimes questionable, work ethic at the distinguished hotel. Though war is looming, his main concern is to serve— and service— the many elderly women who seem to vacation at the hotel. Fiennes’ dry delivery of Anderson’s quippy dialogue both reflects Gustave’s incredible seriousness while concealing a singular sort of solitude. His gregariousness directed toward older women and his passion for his job is complimented with an effeteness that is never wholly confirmed, left unfulfilled. It highlights his lonely existence. On his own, he practically lives and sleeps in nothing but a broom closet.

All around Gustave is a rich cast of characters who never take away too much presence from this wonderfully rich yet solitary character. Adrien Brody and Willem Dafoe play sinister fellows dressed in black. Meanwhile, Saoirse Ronan and Tony Revolori play young innocents in puppy love. In between all manner of people appear and sometimes die off, Jeff Goldblum’s attorney Kovacs is met one particularly gruesome end, preceded by a minor bit of dismemberment dealt by the often sneering and silent Jopling (Dafoe).

The film’s plot is loose but has a caper-like quality involving an inheritance, a priceless painting and murder. There are jail breaks and chases. Anderson’s new-found affection for action sequences played out by animation and puppets fits the times where much of the action unfolds. The archaic special effects, just like the square aspect ratio, speak to the era. That these thrilling sequences still feel compelling, though almost laughably phony, proves the realism of digital effects overrated. The Grand Budapest Hotel is so richly staged and its characters feel so compelling, you will become rapt in the suspense regardless, just as you would watching a classic film from that time.

Ultimately, though, it’s the character of Gustave who embodies the hotel in its heyday and seems to resonate with a vividness that gives the film an immutable luster. He holds the movie together in all its topsy-turvy madness to ultimately celebrate true, honest, steadfast character. Because he stands as a man alone, he builds respectful relationships and allegiances. It’s a romantic notion to think anyone, though, goes off into the sunset with anybody else, but there’s always the heart and memory. Like all good things, we know the Grand Budapest will fall into languor once his presence disappears, but those stories will forever live on and matter to these characters in this oddly sincere world where malice can never have the last say.

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Note: I interviewed actor Ralph Fiennes ahead of the film’s release. You can read my full interview with him on the art and culture blog “Cultist” from the “Miami New Times.” Jump through the image below:

The Grand Budapest hotel runs 100 minutes and is rated R (there are a few shocks in sex and violence and some intense language). Fox Searchlight Pictures invited me to a preview screening last month for the purpose of the interview and this review. The film opens in wide release today.

(Copyright 2014 by Hans Morgenstern. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.)

April 4, 2013

When famous books are adapted as movies, it’s so easy to say “the book was better.” More often than not, when you ask someone to quickly sum up movies like these, that’s the response you can expect. It is also one of the most inane responses. Not only is the comparison false (apples and oranges, goes the hackneyed expression), but it’s also unfair.

These are two completely different mediums. A book is made of words. It’s a solitary experience that demands the imagination of the reader. A film is visual, and as such engages the eyes differently. It also has sound, which often includes music. Your characters and set pieces have a consistent look separate from the viewer’s imagination. In fact, the only “language” of cinema open to the imagination lies in the cuts during the editing process. “This is what’s called the language of cinema,” said Director Martin Scorsese of editing at his recent Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities this past Monday night in Washington (read a report here).

Keroauc’s book has been acknowledged as one of 20th century literature’s great works, the definitive chronicle of postwar America’s Beat Generation. I read it at the end of my studies in literature and journalism and never forgot it. The language and rhythm Kerouac used in his text was famously known as having been influenced by the bebop music that dominated the New York City club scene he frequented. Add to that the influence of writer friends like Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs and the wannabe charisma of Neal Cassady, and Kerouac was left brimming with inspiration to create a text like no other.

Those open to the destruction of the rules of sentence and paragraph structure found the text intoxicating and musical. It had a verve for life and living and seizing the day, even though Kerouac notably maintained a distance to the action, expressing a verse of vicarious living through people like Ginsberg, Burroughs and Cassady, whose names he changed in the book to Carlo Marx, Old Bull Lee and Dean Moriarty. There were women, drugs, drinking and, most important, the open road connecting East Coast USA to West Coast. But above all, it was men looking to connect with each other in as real and visceral a way as possible.

Though scenes in the book seem like aimless wandering, slacking and dreaming by a group of man-children who refuse to grow up, settle down and give the women in their lives the stable home they yearn for, the book still burns with a lust for living in the moment. Kerouac’s passion for the lives of those embracing the moment is seen through rose-colored glasses, precious to those men who embrace living life on benzedrine, liquor and pot to a fault. Yet, the consequence remains only in the nostalgic moments when the high wears off, and they have lost sight of the bigger picture. The only quest in the book is a hopeful, sloppy search for Dean’s long-lost father. Otherwise, it’s a search for capturing the verve of life in long meandering sentences that resist arrival at a punctuation point.

Earlier Adaptations

How does a longtime filmmaker like Salles even think to handle this sort of material, known as much for its language, as the actions within? It’s not possible. Few have noted that film versions of the early Kerouac/Cassady-era inspired two other films. Heart Beat (1980) andThe Last Time I Committed Suicide(1997) were based on other sources of the period that covered On the Road, yet still contained scenes and situations that defined On the Road: conflicted affections between people and fast cars that literalized fleeing from conflict. The first featured Nick Nolte and John Heard as Cassady and Kerouac respectively. The later film, based on a letter Cassady wrote Kerouac, starred Thomas Jane as Cassady and featured a character inspired by Ginsberg played by Adrien Brody. It also featured a pre-Matrix Keanu Reeves. Kerouac’s character remains a sort of ghost, however.

These are obscure films for the simple fact that they went nowhere in the cinematic worlds of their time. They did not fail because of any ineptitude of those involved. Though the drama is certainly as frenetic as anything depicted in On the Road, the staging and presentation of that action falls rather inert. What both are missing is the language and rhythm of the narrative that brought the seeming aimless tragedy of these characters to vibrant life.

The failures of these films say something about the material, and it is bound to doom Salles’ film, despite the fact that it is the first true adaptation of On the Road. It will not satisfy anyone looking for something remotely resembling the feeling of book precisely because of the limits of cinema in handling material so reliant on the language of the text itself. Ironically, the problem of this film adaptation arrives in its almost literal approach to the material. However, there are many cinematic elements that do, ultimately, make the film worthwhile.

The Film Review

Keroac’s stand-in, Sal Paradise (a low-key Sam Riley) first appears in voice over reading from the text. The presumption that such a straightforward gimmick to include the text already sets the movie up for a sort of disappointment. Riley does not get the voice and rhythm of the text until the film’s finale, when he mimics Kerouac’s own famous reading of the book’s end on “the Steve Allen Show” (you can watch Kerouac’s original TV appearance here). Otherwise, his readings feel so straight, one is left to wonder if the voice-over narrative is even based on the original text.

But then, the slack voice for most of the film may be appropriate considering that, for most of the film, Sal is searching for inspiration to write the Great American Novel. We meet Sal drinking at a bar with his friend Carlo (Tom Sturridge) who seems to rub in the fact that his mind is a “veritable echo chamber of epiphanies.” But soon, in search of some reefer, the two will meet Dean (Garrett Hedlund), who will become a sort of savior for the both of them. After they knock on a door to a rundown apartment, Dean opens it wide, standing there stark naked. Carlo can’t seem to lick his lips enough as he sizes Dean up and Sal just seems in awe. Dean holds out a hand to Sal, they shake and Dean compliments Sal on his strong grip.

Played by Hedlund with a cool swagger, Dean comes across as a vivacious rapscallion, who Sal both praises and writes off as a con man, early in the film. After barging in on Sal’s Christmas dinner at his sister’s North Carolina home with his teenage wife Marylou (Kristen Stewart) and his “old pal” Ed Dunkle (Danny Morgan), the trio mooch off the meal like hungry hobos (which they pretty much are). Though Dean tries to remember manners in front Sal’s uptight mother, it’s all airs, as he can’t wait to tell Sal about his experience with a virgin during an interracial orgy. Sal convinces his mother to drive back to New York City with the trio instead of taking the bus, and she hesitantly agrees. When Dean steals gas from a filling station by resetting the pump, upsetting Sal’s mother, Sal notes, “This is the new, complete Dean.”

The film, like the book is filled with these seeming aimless vignettes/character sketches, as it bounds along across the U.S. before ending in Mexico. These people might seem reckless and unsympathetic as the film moves along rapidly from scene to scene with little consequence. At one point Carlo says, “There is no gold at the end of the rainbow, just shit and piss but to know that makes me free.” That actually is the key to this film, which offers a gritty look at people choosing to live life on the brink of near madness and abandon. With its worn, earthy tones in its costumes and set design, the film feels immersive. Even the choice of shooting trees stripped of leaves along the winter roadways and the dust billowing off the California farm fields keeps the harsh landscape in perspective where these rough-edged characters dwell.

As opposed to Heart Beat and The Last Time I Committed Suicide, Salles’ film could stand as the best of the Kerouac/Cassady relationship films, and one can tell it was made with affection for these characters, who are all well-portrayed thanks to sincere performances by all actors involved, including a delightful cameo by Viggo Mortensenas Old Bull. And forget those crosshairs on poor Stewart. She remains a capable actress for all the outside perceptions associated with the Twilight films and the malicious gossip world. Though she does appear too far from the age of 16 to play Marylou, she maintains a smoldering personage who can enjoy living in the moment as well as the guys in her life, yet harbor a pining for that American Dream so prevalent in postwar America: a picket-fence home with a loving family.

The other important woman in Sal’s and Dean’s lives, Camille, is played with sincerity by Kirsten Dunst. She has a compact but heartbreaking scene where she threatens to kick Dean out of their home on the West Coast that captures the poor woman’s yearning for Dean to stand up and settle into his role as father to their two children. After a drunken night out with a visiting Sal, she packs a suitcase with his clothes and yells at him to get out, as their children wail. He kisses one of the babies and says, “I’ll be back soon” in a calm voice. “Don’t you lie to her!” yells Camille. “Liar! Liar!” She yells at him as a sort of mantra to ignore a still suffocating affection for this fuckup of a man.

It’s a quick scene, but the actors load it with potency. And a strange moody soundtrack by the talented Argentine composer Gustavo Santaolalladoes not add any sentiment to these proceedings but, rather, a melancholic sort of atmosphere. In fact, it feels alien to the world of bebop where these characters live. Beyond rowdy jazz club visits by the protagonists, Santaolalla uses instruments like thumb piano, flute and dulcimer for his score. It almost subverts the jazz that informs the movie, as once again, Salles heroically tries to move away from tropes that make the novel so distinctive.

There is so much more going on with these characters, including the rampant sexual quality of Marylou and Dean, who seems to enjoy sex with men as much as he does with women. He also doesn’t turn down an opportunity to give it out to a slimy travelling salesman (Steve Buscemi) looking to exchange a sexual tryst for gas money. Jose Rivera’s script jumps around trying to keep up with the people, but their living and suffering becomes so muted in these break-neck scenes, it becomes hard to invest in them. What remains missing is the poetic quality of the text that allows you to forgive them their seeming reckless self-indulgence. The members of the Beat generation were an inspired bunch in spite of their sensational behavior. But the visual quality of film only allows for the superficial experience of what they were most loved for: their writings. Hence, an attempt for as equally a transcendent movie becomes an exercise in futility.

Conclusion

Last year, I commended Andrea Arnold for her adaptation of Wuthering Heights because she went outside the box to create a cinematic feeling of the book (Film Review: Andrea Arnold’s raw and impressionistic take on ‘Wuthering Heights’). Those looking for a feeling of that classic 19th century novel in visual form would not have been disappointed. The film was not a complete success, but it never could have been, as noted in the introduction of this post about On the Road. Still it worked better than Salles’ adaptation of On the Road because of its creativity.

The inherit problem with On the Road also lies in the constant ambling of these characters. They never settle down long enough anywhere for the viewer to feel empathy for any situation they put themselves in. They always seem to be fleeing something, which stunts the drama of conflict.

Instead, Salles’ On the Road makes for a nice, sometimes emotional photo montage of the source novel, but there’s no way it can replace reading the book whose poetry, by nature of the medium, remains missing from the film. Pulling off something that Arnold accomplished would have been a very difficult line for Salles, or any filmmaker working with On the Road for that matter, to straddle. It could have easily turned from sincere to hokum. In the end, it’s unfair to deride Salles’ work as a failure. Call it a doomed notion with an outcome that should at least satisfy those searching for a pretty-looking mood piece on tormented people searching for a place in post-war America.

On the Road is rated R and has a runtime of 125 minutes. In South Florida, it opens at the Coral Gables Art Cinemaon April 5. It expands to the Cinema Paradiso in Fort Lauderdale, on April 19. IFC Films provided an on-line screener for the purposes of this review.

(Copyright 2013 by Hans Morgenstern. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.)

May 12, 2012

After bursting on the indie film scene in 1998 with American History X, director Tony Kaye has worked sporadically, to say the least. His next film would arrive more than 10 years later and was even better received, though very different in form. Released in 2006, some declared the two-and-a-half-hour documentary Lake of Fire the definitive film on the abortion debate. The man has a mind for social consciousness and it continues to show in his ambitious return to feature film making: Detachment. With an expansive cast that includes James Caan, Blythe Danner, Marcia Gay Harden, Christina Hendricks, Lucy Liu and starring Adrien Brody— all giving powerful performances— it seems such a shame the director does not explore them more than superficially.

The film explores an array of perspectives— too many perspectives, slipping into ungainly narrative overkill. It opens with a confusing setup from the get go: black and white footage of talking heads who talk about how they stumbled into teaching at public schools and grown to love it. Brody’s character joins the monologues, but his image is in color. He talks about educators with his own admiration. It almost comes across as a documentary on school teachers. But, no, this is a film about a substitute teacher named Henry Barthes (Brody) with a load of baggage, which appears in flashbacks on what looks to be 8 mm home movie footage, intercut a few seconds at a time into the film’s action. These flashbacks follow him at school, at home caring for a teenage prostitute (Sami Gayle) he took in from off the street and while he tends to his ailing grandfather (Louis Zorich) at a nursing home.

As the film plays out, Henry’s memory will be revealed. Though it offers a doozy of a dark trauma, it illuminates the character too late for the sake of the action that plays out during the majority of this meandering movie.

That action unfolds in quick snippets with shaky, handheld camera that sometimes slips out of focus trying to keep up with it all. It’s an artistic embellishment but also highlights the film’s issues. The narrative moves around so much it allows little room for believable, dynamic interaction between the characters, much less honest character development. As the educators act out in extreme ways: crying, yelling, popping pills, throwing desks, curling up on the floor in the fetal position to make announcements over the school’s PA, none of these people seem to genuinely connect.

The gulf between teachers and students is even more ungainly, as it should be in the dramatic frame of the school-based drama. However, when the connections do occur they seem contrived and clichéd. Barthes arrives at a failing school to sub in an English class for a month. He immediately sacrifices a child who talks back to the hallway as an example. Next, a foul-mouthed black kid in a do-rag gets up in his face demanding a sheet of paper and pen. Henry stands his ground and gives the kid what he wants, along with a little speech about understanding his anger. He also shows a gentle touch to Meredith (Betty Kaye), a chubby girl sitting in the back of the class. It is soon revealed she has an artistic talent that portends a troubled psyche, but no one seems to pay attention to it. Her father tells her she is wasting her time and Henry calls her talented. But the connections do not go deeper than superficially.

Henry is only in the classroom a few times in the movie. Reading from George Orwell’s 1984, he lectures his students on doublethink and ubiquitous assimilation, a great term for the hypocrisy of popular culture nowadays. The lecture offers a revealing moment, illuminating not only the character’s frustration with getting through to kids today but also probably the director’s well-intended motivations behind the film. However, one cannot throw in a dramatic speech in the middle of a film about dysfunction and put a bow on it. It is too easy to make this moment alone the connecting bond with the students and teacher. The film needs more than an array of hysterical, revolving door characters and one tidy moment of connection that seems to contradict the problems at the heart of film. While offering a grim look at the generational divide of today’s youth and the teachers trying to reach them through out-dated curriculum, the connection between Henry and his students seems a clichéd moment. Reading from a book long part of the high school curriculum is too easy and hypocritical a solution.

Brody gives a focused and powerful performance, as do many of his co-stars, but the camera should have stayed more focused on him and his need to come to terms with a traumatic past. Everyone has issues in Detachment, but a few minutes of the intimate, extreme problems of the other characters who never seem to connect with the main character only feels superfluous. Detachment might have been a better film with a longer runtime, allowing for more character development for the main characters. In the end, the film just feels like a lumpy, melodramatic mess that leaves the viewer feeling too little for too much.

May 11, 2012

For now, most have only seen 16-year-old Sami Gayle co-starring as Tom Selleck’s precocious but sensitive granddaughter in CBS’ acclaimed drama “Blue Bloods.” However, the Weston-raised actress is on the cusp of a major breakout in films. Next year will see her sharing the screen in a sci-fi thriller with Paul Giamatti (The Congress) and an actioner with Nicolas Cage (Medallion), but her introduction on the big screen arrives in a much-anticipated independent film: Detachment.

The film’s director Tony Kaye burst on to the indie scene in 1998 as the director of American History X, a film about a Neo-Nazi skinhead that helped make Edward Norton a star, and Kaye had not made a feature since. Kaye found Gayle working on Broadway and cast her as a teenage prostitute in his long overdue follow-up, Detachment.

Starring and co-produced by Oscar-winning actor Adrien Brody, the film offers a grim look at the generational divide between today’s youth and the teachers trying to reach them. Speaking over the phone ahead of her visit to the Miami Beach Cinematheque, where Gayle will introduce the film and participate in a Q&A, Gayle says, “We’re really trying to promote the film and promote the message of the film, which we think is very strong and socially relevant in today’s society.”

As can be expected from Kaye, Detachment features some heavy subject matter. Dealing with issues of sexuality, bullying and abuse, the MPAA has not rated the movie. However, Gayle thinks a more mature young audience can handle the film. “I think that, ultimately, that’s up to the parents,” she notes, “but I think that the message the film gives of parental guidance and about the effect that a teacher can have on a student’s life, as well as the flaws in the public education system and the good things about the public education system, I think it’s good for kids to see it.”

Detachment marks Gayle’s first experience in a feature film. Shot two years ago, she still relies on many lessons she learned working with Brody. “Every single day, Adrien said to me, going into a scene, ‘It has to be you and me against the world in this scene,’ and what he taught me is the importance of intimacy between the actors in a scene … I think Adrien is such a present actor that it was easy to portray the feelings that I had to portray in the film.”

Detachment is not rated and runs 97 min. It opened in Miami Beach Thursday, May 10, at the Miami Beach Cinematheque, which hosted a preview screening for the purposes of this story. Co-star Sami Gayle will appear tonight at the Miami Beach Cinematheque, Friday, at 8:45 p.m., to introduce the film and for a Q&A with the audience after the screening. Detachment also opens in the Miami area at the University of Miami’s Cosford Cinema, Friday, May 11, at 9 p.m. and at the Tower Theater at 9:15 p.m.

(Copyright 2012 by Hans Morgenstern. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.)